On Thursday 08 April 2010, Greg Lindahl wrote: > On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 04:13:21PM +0000, [email protected] wrote: > > What are the approaches and experiences of people interconnecting > > clusters of more than128 compute nodes with QDR InfiniBand technology? > > Are people directly connecting to chassis-sized switches? Using > > multi-tiered approaches which combine 36-port leaf switches? > > I would expect everyone to use a chassis at that size, because it's cheaper > than having more cables. That was true on day 1 with IB, the only question > is "are the switch vendors charging too high of a price for big switches?"
Recently we've (swedish academic centre) got offers using 1U 36-port switches not chassis from both Voltaire and Qlogic reason given: lower cost. So from our point of view, yes, "switch vendors [are] charging too high of a price for big switches" :-) One "pro" for many 1U switches compared to a chassi is that it gives you more topological flexibility. For example, you can build a 4:1 over subscribed fat-tree and that will obviously be cheaper than a chassi (even if they were more reasonably priced). /Peter
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